The Early Asimov Volume 3 - By Isaac Asimov Page 0,1
discovered that I had a natural flair for the lecture platform.)
On February 9, 1942, the third meeting I attended, there was present a young man, Joseph Goldberger, whom I had not met before. He was a couple of years older than I was. I did most of the reading that day and Goldberger was sufficiently impressed to suggest, after the meeting had adjourned, that the two of us, with our girls, go out on a double date and get to know each other. Embarrassed, I had to explain that I had no girl. With an expansive gesture, he said he would get one for me.
And so he did. On February 14, 1942, (Valentine's Day and the day after I had passed my qualifying examinations) I met him at the Astor Hotel at 8.30 p.m. With him was his girlfriend, and with her was her girl-friend, Gertrude Blugerman, who was going to be my blind date. -I fell in love, and when I wasn't thinking of research I was thinking of her.
But there was also a third change, in a way the most drastic-
With war, the job situation suddenly changed: technically trained men of all sorts were in demand.
Robert Heinlein, for instance, was an engineer who had been trained at Annapolis. His health had retired him from active service in the Navy and had kept him retired, but his Annapolis connections made it possible for him to work as a civilian engineer at the Naval Air Experimental Station of the U.S. Navy Yard in Philadelphia. He cast about for other qualified people he might persuade to join him there, particularly among his fellow science fiction writers.
He got L. Sprague de Camp to come to the N.A.E.S., and on March 30, 1942, I received a letter from the navy yard asking if I would consider joining them.
I am rather single-minded and, having labored toward my Ph.D. for a year and a half, I would not ordinarily have considered letting go for anything short of a major force. - But the major force was there. I was in love and I wanted to get married even more than I wanted my degree. It occurred to me that I could suspend work toward my Ph.D. with the full approval of the school, thanks to the war emergency, and that I could also get full permission to resume after the war. And by taking a job and postponing - merely postponing - my research, I could get married.
I went down to Philadelphia for an interview on April 10 and apparently met their requirements. I took the iob, and on May 14, having left my father's candy store at last and (at least as a worker) forever, I moved to Philadelphia. Fortunately, Philadelphia was only an hour and a half from New York by train (in those days, I couldn't drive a car and, even if I could, I wouldn't have been able to get the gasoline because of rationing). I was therefore back in New York every weekend.
By the twenty-fourth of the month I had persuaded Gertrude to agree to marry me, and on July 26 we were married.
During those months it did not bother me that I was doing no writing. I had too much to think of - first the war, then research, then the job, then the marriage.
Besides, in the years up to early 1942, I never thought of my writing as anything but a way to help out with my college tuition. It was fun; it was exciting; and such success as I managed to achieve was deeply satisfying - but it had been done to serve a purpose and that purpose had been served. I had no notion that writing could be my career; that it could ever possibly be my career.
My career was to be chemistry. All the time I was writing and selling stories, I was also slaving away at Columbia. Once I earned my Ph.D., I intended to make my living by doing chemical research for some large industry at some munificent salary such as a hundred dollars a week. (As the son of a candy-store keeper, brought up in the depression, I suffered dizzy spells if I tried to think of more than a hundred dollars a week, so I confined my ambitions to that.)
My Philadelphia job, to be sure, paid me only fifty dollars a week at the beginning, but a young couple could live on that, those days, with taxes very small, with an